Israel targets Gaza tunnels, 4 militants said dead

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip The Israeli military says its warplanes hit a tunnel in the Gaza Strip Friday that was intended for use in terror attacks on the Jewish state.

Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, claims the airstrike killed three Palestinian militants, the Reuters news agency reports, in what Reuters says would be the most killed in an incident there in months.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) also says its engineers blew another Gaza tunnel Thursday, and that five Israeli troops were wounded there when Hamas set off an explosive device in response. The IDF says soldiers fired at and hit a militant. Palestinian authorities say the militant died.

Israel also said that, in building the tunnels, Hamas had broken a ceasefire reached a year ago after an eight-day, cross-border war.

Reuters notes that, "The Israel-Gaza frontier had been mostly quiet for the past year after the Jewish state and ... Hamas ended a brief war last November in an Egyptian-brokered truce."

The IDF pointed out that militants used a similar tunnel in 2006 to kill two Israeli soldiers and kidnap a third.